24 A family is worth a lot more than a wound

We were like kings under the covers. Everything was warm, cozy, wonderful. I blinked, my head buried comfortably in the pillow. Through the slits of the closed shutters a faint light seeped in, as well as the rumor of a city slowly awakening from its slumber… It would have been a wonderful awakening if Le Bor’s face had not hung over me with an expression that gave off bad vibes. I swallowed my fright, and waking suddenly, said in an innocent tone:

“Ayo, Bor…”

I blundered. Le Bor took me by the shirt he had “lent” me at the request of his lady and shook me.

“Bor, your mother, Four-Hundred!”

“Sir!” I exclaimed.

His eyes flashing, he raised a fist and waved it under my eyes, threatening.

“You will pay for that,” he growled.

I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that, but I understood that Le Bor was upset. And that the lady had already left and was not there to tell dear Shyuli to calm down. Little Wolf, already awake, was standing on a chair. He had just turned to look at us…

I reacted quickly. I got out of bed and swore:

“I’m leaving, it runs, I’m leaving!”

“Wait a minute,” Le Bor replied. He threw my clothes in my face. “Give me back the shirt, it’s mine. Coldpalm made me promise to give you a hand, not to let you use the bed where my lady sleeps! By the spirits, if you tell anyone about this, I’ll rip out your tongue and eyes, understand?”

I nodded energetically as I hastily dressed.

“Not a word, sir. Not one word. I meant no disrespect. I swear. It was the lady…”

“Accuse my lady and you’ll get one,” Le Bor warned, shaking his fist at me.

“It runs, sir,” I snorted.

I put my five necklaces back on at once, put on my cap, and took Little Wolf. I almost asked him about Frashluc, about those eight hundred and forty siatos, about the story that Coldpalm had saved his life… But Le Bor was irritated, and when Le Bor was irritated, there was no discussion. I had learned that at Carnation. So when he opened the door for me, I obediently stepped out. The door closed without even an “ayo”. I sighed and muttered with a grimace:

“Ayo, ayo…”

I descended the stairs, put Little Wolf down, and as soon as I came out of the dead end, my mood brightened again. I remembered the trout, the card game, the warm blankets, and the happy face of Little Wolf… If only Rogan could have had such a good night! The thought reminded me of the diamond, and my good mood wavered a little. That damned diamond…

I looked down at the blond boy and smiled at him.

“Hey, Little Wolf. You hungry?” He nodded as he chewed idly and put two fingers back in his mouth without taking his eyes off me. I rummaged in my pocket without much hope and sighed. “Well, I don’t have a nail. But surely one of my cronies must have some. I bet a fivenail they’re with Swift, wanna bet?” I said.

And we set off. It was still very early, and it was possible that Manras and Dil, influenced by Diver, had ditched the newspapers and were still at the shelter, in the ruined house above the Hippodrome ravine. And there they were. I saw them in front of the house, standing in a circle with other gwaks and obviously discussing something important. Well, Manras and Dil weren’t talking: the older ones were. I was already joining them when two of them rushed at each other and rolled on the ground, tearing each other’s hair and covering each other with punches. The others clapped their hands and sang the battle song, which was simply: roll, roll…! And indeed, the two opponents were rolling. I yawned and went over to Dil. I pushed his head.

“Shyur! Do you know where Diver is?”

On seeing me, Manras cried out:

“Sharpy! Ragok told Lin that he doesn’t want to pay the twenty-five he owes him!”

And Dil answered me:

“I didn’t see him last night, Sharpy. He said to wait for him here this morning because maybe he needs reinforcements for I don’t know what. Where is the Priest?”

I grimaced.

“He’s all right,” I assured him. And, suspicious, I repeated, “What reinforcements? Does he want to make a double with you or what?”

“Not at all,” Manras laughed. And, lowering his voice like a schemer, he whispered in my ear, “Diver doesn’t dive pockets anymore. He’s an ambassador now.”

“An ambassador?” I repeated, not understanding.

Manras shrugged, as if to say he didn’t know any more than I did. Mmph… Deciding not to dig deeper into Diver’s affairs, I asked:

“Do you have some nails? It’s not for me, it’s for Little Wolf. Today, he’s staying with you. It runs?”

“It runs,” they both agreed.

I smiled at them and turned to Ragok and Lin. The fight was almost over, and Lin was about to win. In the end, Ragok would have to pay for those twenty-five nails… A punch marked the victory. They both stood up, muddy and bruised, and with the dignity of the defeated, Ragok shook hands with Lin. And there they were, all friends again.

“Well, I’m off,” I informed my cronies. “Take care of Little Wolf. Ayo!”

They responded to my greeting, and with my hands in my pockets, I walked away down the street. I had hardly taken a few steps when I heard someone call out to me:

“Namesake, what’s up!”

I turned and saw Swift coming out of the ruined house with a brisk gait. The other gwaks fell silent and followed the kap with their eyes as he walked towards me. He had a stick in his hand. And when I saw the carved lynx head, I gasped. It was the stick that Swift had stolen from me in the spring.

The red-haired elf stopped in front of me. He had grown taller and must have been as tall as Yal. He leaned on the staff and said:

“Now come on, namesake. First, you come in the middle of the night and talk to Diver until morning, then your cronies come and settle here, and now you bring us a toddler. Well, then, tell me once and for all, gwak: are you leaving or staying?” The question caught me so off guard that I did not know what to answer, and he raised the stick before my eyes and repeated, “You leaving or staying.”

I nodded. I could hardly give a more ambiguous answer, and Swift rolled his eyes.

“Are you leaving?”

“I’m staying,” I replied suddenly.

The decision was not very difficult to make: my cronies and Little Wolf were already there, I had no other place to go, and Swift, despite everything, was not a bad guy.

My namesake arched an eyebrow at my abrupt response and nodded thoughtfully.

“That is, if I decide you can,” he nuanced.

I looked at him, neither pleading nor arrogant, and waited for his verdict. The elf twirled the staff, played with it, and observed:

“Every good gwak passes a test before entering my band.” He paused and added, “Let’s do it right now. Almost everyone in the band is here, only three are missing. Do you have time?”

I shrugged and said:

“I do.”

“You got guts?”

I clenched my jaws.

“Sure, I do,” I said.

Swift smiled and warned me:

“Don’t chicken out.”

“I’m not chickening out.”

“And don’t be a smart ass.”

I grimaced and did not reply. Then I received a small pat of the stick on my arm.

“Follow me.”

He turned his back on me and called the other gwaks. We all entered the ruined house. Diver was right: the view from there was magnificent. In the distance, we could see the trees of the Crypt, the Ravines, the glistening river…

“So, are we all in agreement?”

Swift’s voice reminded me that we were in the middle of an initiation. Everyone had now formed a circle around me and the redheaded elf, and they corroborated with “natural”, “runs for me”, and nods of agreement. All, then, agreed to accept me into the band. This was not surprising: we all knew each other. Some were even sokwatas from the Well and we shared the same misery, the same life. And they thought of me as a good gwak.

“Manras. Dil. You too,” Swift ordered.

My cronies entered the circle. Neither of them seemed to know exactly what was going to happen. I patted them on the arm to let them know that everything was normal and looked into Swift’s eyes.

“Take off your coats and roll up your sleeves,” the kap said.

We laid down our coats and all three of us rolled up our sleeves. All the other gwaks were watching the scene as they must have done many times before, with solemn and attentive expressions. Swift finally took a knife from his bag. He too had rolled up his sleeves and said:

“I swear by my ancestors that I will protect and help my new family.”

And, without warning, he cut his arm. A thin red line appeared. His arm was already covered with scars, I observed. However, one could hardly see them, for Swift’s arms were pockmarked like his face. He handed me the blood-reddened knife.

“Now you.”

I swallowed and thought that it was a good thing that I had to cut my arm and not my right hand, because then they would have been surprised to see that mine was not bleeding. Manras was breathing hastily, and I whispered:

“Calm down, Manras.”

I took the knife, placed the point of the blade a little lower than my elbow and said, loud and clear:

“I swear by my ancestors that I will protect and help my new family.”

I took a deep breath, and without trembling, under the watchful eyes of my future companions, I imitated Swift and slashed my arm. I hardly felt the pain: I was already too used to it because of the sokwata. Stoically, I passed the knife to Dil and was about to lick my wound, but Swift stopped me by putting a hand on my shoulder. He smiled at me.

“Welcome to my gang, namesake.”

At that moment, I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was sincerely happy to have me in his band. I smiled back, glad to have passed the test, and we both turned to my cronies. They were apprehensive. Under my impatient gaze, Dil hurried to say the formula, made a rather ridiculous cut, and looked at Swift as if to ask, “Is that enough?” The elf rolled his eyes, nodded, and welcomed him. Manras, on the other hand, was unable to slash his arm, and he stammered something about being dizzy. Dizzy, your mother… Just for a little cut on the arm? In the end, I had to help him, and my namesake cleared his throat before saying:

“Welcome to the gang.” And, patting Manras’ cheek with a sneering look, he added, “A family is worth a lot more than a wound, shyur.”

Manras nodded energetically.

“Natural!”

And, as if to release his tension, he leapt about among all the gwaks present, displaying his wound as a trophy. We were given a general welcome in a chaotic hubbub, and after shaking many hands, I pondered Swift’s words. A family, I repeated to myself. I looked at my new companions who were walking away, chatting, pushing, yawning, laughing… and I smiled. Well, natural. They were the best family a gwak could have. And it was like no other. They were a real family. And, now, it was mine. My smile widened. Suddenly, I felt that joining Swift’s gang had been a ragingly good decision.

I put my hand on Little Wolf’s blond head as he was watching the commotion with great curiosity.

“Well, you’ve got yourself quite a family, Little Wolf, you can’t complain, can you?” And I stood upright in the middle of the ruins, contemplating the magnificent view. “Good mother, how pretty,” I murmured. And, realizing that Little Wolf couldn’t see everything from so low, I took him in my arms and said, “Look at this, shyur! You like it, don’t you? Don’t you like the house?” Little Wolf made no move, and I huffed, putting him back down on the floor. “Little demorjed. Of course you like it. We’re not as warm as at the lady’s house, but we won’t get kicked out from here… Hey, what do you have there?” I asked. I took his small hand. The kid was grasping a small bone. When I saw it, I laughed, touched. “Good mother, you take after me! Suck it, like this, like this, but don’t swallow it, or you’ll pop off. My master used to say: where there’s a bone, there’s hope. He said that bones hold treasures. Do you believe me, shyur? Treasures!”

Little Wolf smiled at me with a bone in his teeth. He looked so comical that I laughed and continued to laugh at him for a while. Several times, I said that I was leaving, that I had business, but there was always something to distract me. The sokwatas shared with me the best places to look for asofla, and I told them about the alchemist and his endless experiments; I helped clean the house with a broom made by the kap himself; and finally, with Lin the Daredevil, I climbed the highest dilapidated wall that was left standing, and there, at the top, Lin wanted to prove to me that, being theoretically the son of a musician, he knew more songs than I did. We began to list them to the point of exhaustion… And, well, between one silly thing and another, I stayed there almost all morning. Finally, seeing that one by one, the companions were going to earn their bread, I decided to move, and I took leave of the troop. It was time to go and rescue Rogan.

I retrieved the picklocks from my hiding place in the middle of the Labyrinth and made my way to the Street of Bone. I did not enter the latter, but the parallel street. I entered a dead end and, making sure no one could see me, I started to climb a gutter to the roof of a building. At one point, I slipped, but I held on tighter, and in a few moments, I was up, hidden between two roofs, not far, I thought, from the Hostel. And indeed, after crossing two roofs, I came upon a building a little higher up, and I thought I recognized the two windows of the upper office, where Korther kept his vases, his books, his carpets, and I could only hope that he kept his diamonds there also.

Advancing from tile to tile, I approached the wall just below one of the windows and groped for handholds to climb. I found it. And I hesitated, crouching against the wall, thinking. It was daylight. It wasn’t impossible that someone would see me from the street or from a window, and then… I would be in big trouble. Besides, I had promised Frashluc’s grandson that I would let him accompany me to steal the Wind Tear. If only I could be sure that it was in this office…

The sky was covered with grey clouds, and as I pondered, huddled on my roof, snowflakes began to fall. Thinking was all well and good, but in the meantime, I was freezing.

I moved and said to myself that I could at least go and see if it was possible to enter through that window. Wrapped in grey harmonies to blend in with the wall, I began to climb. I reached the edge of the window and held out my right hand, convinced that I would find an alarm, a trap… Nothing.

I frowned and with an effort pulled myself up. The ledge was so ridiculously narrow that it was not easy to find a stable position. I was examining the opening, thinking that a picklock could be used for leverage, when, to my surprise, something went off, and a mass of energy shot through me like a bolt of lightning. It left me fried. I fell against the tiles of the neighboring house and would have remained there, dazed, had I not been shaken by spasms which sent me rolling towards the void. A stroke of luck brought me close to a chimney, and a gleam of good sense caused me to cling to it and use it for support.

When the spasms subsided, it took me another good while to relax my jaw and breathe normally. I had a horrible headache. It felt like it was going to burst. It was nightmarishly painful. With a trembling hand, I reached into my pocket and took out some of the asofla stems given to me by the sokwatas of the gang. I put them all in my mouth. But they did not help my headache.

I sighed. Good mother, what kind of traps were these that could only be detected by activating them? Korther and his artifacts…

Still trembling, I went back into the dead end and put one foot before the other, awkwardly and fumblingly, feeling as if my muscles were stiffening. I was reaching the end of the street when I heard a voice on my right.

“Draen?”

I blinked and opened my eyes wide. Oh, no…